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Haiti-based musician asks after the quake: “Where do you put bodies when the morgues are full?”

Richard Morse of the band RAM was in Port-au-Prince when the quake hit. He's Twittering @RAMhaiti

Richard Morse is frontman for RAM, a Haiti-based band that has popularized the songs of the countryside with a rock and reggae beat.
Morse was in Port-au-Prince working on an album when the earthquake hit on Tuesday. He is Twittering about the experience in a very personal and chilling way @RAMhaiti.

On Thursday, he described the ghoulish horror, the smell, of rising death and decay.

“Bodies.Bodies.Bodies Bodies.Bodies.Bodies. I don’t know how else to say it. They’re being brought out on the street,” he wrote this afternoon around 3:30 p.m.
“Horrific stories of death. Death is everywhere. Death is all over PauP. Doors as stretchers. Camionettes as ambulances.”

And later:
“Body clean-up. Where do you put bodies when the morgues are full?”

AP

It is becoming an important question, and it’s one that public health authorities have addressed.

Workers who actually handle the remains need to take precautions to protect themselves from direct contact, but for passers by, the risk is minimal, the agency said.
“The sight and smell of decay are unpleasant, but they do not create a public health hazard.”

The Pan American Health Organization had similar advice: “The belief that dead bodies pose a serious health threat often leads authorities to take misguided action, such as mass burials, which can add to the burden of suffering already experienced by survivors.”